I recently made comments in my blog about Bioshock 2 not being as immersive or as engaging as the original… I was completely wrong! The game starts slowly; it's a grinding pace to get through the first 2-4 hours of game play. I found the story at that time very dull.
O.k., cool, I'm a Big Daddy… what now? I am trying to get to my little sister that is now grown up? It all seemed rather dull, and I had no expectations that this would last me an entire game. It seemed like a weak premise. In hindsight I couldn't have been more wrong.
The world is as engaging, if not more so, than before. The game's story slowly unfolds into this mad dash of "I must get to my little sister". It really began to pull at my heart's strings, as if it was my own daughter that was being held prisoner in this God forsaken underwater tin-box of a city. I found the world much further along, evolved into something that it wasn't in the previous game. It had been 10 years since then; people were dancing together by candlelight, just trying to make a life out of this lack-there-of fragment of world. In some ways it was entirely revolting, and in other ways it showed the true power of the human spirit; no matter how deformed and wretched it had become. In this form of hell, people were still trying to adapt and evolve into something that takes control of a situation and makes a positive out of it. I loved this theme throughout the game.
Once again the Little Sister's got me. Every time they would talk to me, my heart would melt. It was so relieving and moving to Rescue a Little Sister. The entire moment of freeing her from the grasp that takes her is very sentimental, and it took me back to the first time I did it in the original. It's such a special moment in a dark world. I think it's the father in me that makes it give off this emotional high. My own kids are around that age, my daughter being just a couple years older than a little sister, which makes me wonder how anyone playing this game can actually harvest one of the Little Sisters. I couldn't watch that cut screen.
The ending, without giving away too many spoilers, while lacking a serious challenge made me so happy to have finished. I love how my Little Sister followed me throughout the game and eventually followed my same path, not to mention the use of her in combat was freaking awesome. I loved that.
The game play of the first is enhanced by the fact that you can use plasmids and weapons at the same time, while this wouldn't have made much sense as a normal human in the first, the Big Daddy has no problem doing it with his strength. I enjoyed this part of the game as it let me get off some majorly fun combos without it being too tedious. It made the game entirely more enjoyable, smooth game play equals win.
In general the difficulty on Normal was only tough at certain points in the game; mostly in the beginning. While the first Big Sisters were incredibly tough ( I was wondering how long it would take me to get the Trophy where you don't die to a Big Sister), they became a joke in the end, as did pretty much every enemy in the game. The only true difficult parts were when you took a LS and gathered more ADAM, though even that became much easier later on. I only Rescued the LS's, this gave me roughly half of the ADAM I would have received from Harvesting. While I guess this would have made the game easier from earlier in the game, by the end it would have been a joke. Rescuing made the game easy from half way through. I began to die less, and Vita-Chambers became unused for much of the end game (where I would normally feel they would be the most useful). I am not sure the game's mechanics let the game stay difficult as you become much more powerful and effective in AOE combat while the monsters don't get any harder, just more of them come at you. Mini-turrets, Rocket launchers, Machine Guns with Armor Piercing rounds, and hacked bots make combat almost a joke. Add in a healthy dose of plasmid traps and Hypnosis and you have yourself a game that is a cake-walk from half way through to the end. Apart from this setback, the game play is phenomenal and just damn fun. Playing it on hard probably takes care of this situation.
All in all I would give Bioshock 2 a resounding thumbs up. The suspense, storyline, game play, and environments just make this one of the best games I have ever played. I couldn't recommend this more for fans of the FPS, horror, or suspense genres; just put the game on hard difficulty if you are looking for somewhat of a challenge.
